The US history of self -serving propaganda is infinitely worse. Woe unto any primary school student who declines to recite the advertising sales pitch designed solely to sell more flags to schoolPledge of Allegiance to the piece of starred and striped cloth. There is legal protection for declining to participate, but it's sort of like the legal protection to eat a hamburger in the middle of a vegetarian street rally.

Check the Congressional Record for more self praise for the country, for each state, and for each and every congress person who ever had a moment to make a speech.

A large percentage of government press releases (all governments worldwide) are just bragging about how great the government is doing.

Turns out it kinda blows too is more exciting than the country constitution, but really is kind of dry too. Eg "Marxism-Leninism brings to light the laws governing the development of the history of human society. Its basic tenets are correct and have tremendous vitality." Now there's prose to pledge your allegiance too, amirite?! Maybe it's more compelling in Chinese.

As the entire world watched mainland China's major stock indices plunge this week, it learned something very important about the country that, for the most part it didn't know before.

China is fragile.

After a massive 150% rally in the Shanghai Composite Index over the last year, on June 12 China's largest stock market (and it's smaller Shenzen Index) started to plummet.

Before the bleeding stopped on Thursday, Shanghai had erased gains from April, May, and June.

And the entire country was shocked — almost as shocked as the rest of the world. China's leading Communist Party (CCP) had been very clear. The people were to buy stocks, and so they did the whole year through up to this point — taking out high-interest-rate loans to do so with gusto.

So when the downturn came, it hit retail investors — who make up 25% of China's stock market — hard. The government tried to do everything it could to stop the stock slide. It ordered large investors not to sell for six months, launched an investigation into short sellers, threw almost $20 billion at the problem, canceled IPOs and more.

The Chinese people responded by blaming foreign bankers, waiting for their government to bail them out completely, and, in some extreme cases, committing suicide.

The odd thing about all this is, as many retail investors as there are in China's stock market, the money actually in the market only makes up about 15% of household assets.

So why the freak out?

Almost the entire world thinks that China is about to or already has overtaken the US as the global superpower, according to a Pew Research Center Poll.

But a 30% stock market slide sent the entire government into emergency mode.

And that is because, despite what the world thinks, China is fragile....